CX experts have time and again agreed that if your customers are not happy, you can’t sustain your business. The logic is simple — A satisfied customer will return to make purchases. But even one unsatisfactory experience can hinder the customer’s return. We all know that it’s cost-effective to keep our existing customers rather than churning them out for new ones. So how can businesses increase customer satisfaction without breaking the bank?
Although customer satisfaction may seem like a product issue, it is driven by the nitty-gritty of customer experience. You want every experience (sales, marketing, and customer service) provided to the customer to meet or surpass their expectations. A crucial part of this expectation is delivered through communication channels like email, VoIP, and live chat.
But let’s get real, when your customer satisfaction scores are dropping, you’ll need to find an innovative way to bring them back up. And traditional channels have saturated their capabilities. What’s more, with these channels, you’ll have to micro-manage every interaction to retain customers, and this could weigh heavily on your customer-facing teams. So why not consider a more modern approach that lets you achieve customer satisfaction and ensures that it sustains over time?
Raising the bar with chatbots.
A simple chatbot integration into your website can boost customer satisfaction instantly. And automate every customer touchpoint. This means the chatbot can carry a conversation with a customer no matter what they are getting in touch for. They turn customer grievances from monologues to dialogues, and a two-way discussion makes your customers feel heard. The chat widget pop-up as soon as the customer enters the website and is ready to offer assistance.
Much like a shop assistant asks whether they could help you with something at the store, the chatbot allows you to initiate a conversation with the customer proactively. While the core capability of chatbots is answering questions, providing an end-to-end experience for your customers through chatbots can lift customer satisfaction levels.
Give customers the answers they are looking for
67% of customer churn is preventable if the customer’s issue is resolved at the first engagement. Integrating chatbots for customer service can drastically reduce customer churn. The fundamental capability of chatbots is to answer anything that your customer asks instantly. All you have to do is train your bot with the most common queries that you receive. From there, your bot learns continuously. It learns from your knowledge base, from on-going conversations and previously raised tickets with your business. It even picks up on phrasing and syntax variations to give the customer a precise answer within seconds. So, you’ll never leave another customer waiting or unattended.
Additionally, chatbots can sense the frustration in customers based on their choice of words. In these cases, the chatbot immediately transfers the conversation to a human representative. It also diligently does the same when it can no longer provide relevant answers to the customer.
Turn their visit into a fulfilling experience
Chatbots are so easy to use that it magnifies the usability of your website. Usually, every click a customer makes reduces their chances of going through with the purchase. So, the fewer the clicks, the higher the chance of purchase. This is why Amazon’s ‘Buy-with-1-click’ is such a big success. Chatbots give customers the ability to accomplish their purpose with little-to-no clicks.
Do your customers want to know more about your product? The bot sends them collateral. Do they want a demo of your product? The bot sets up a one-click scheduling calendar. Every process that was taking you days to complete, can be done within minutes with bots. Chatbots can also give your customers order details, it can complete payment processes and help with sharing engaging content (like blogs, webinars, and newsletters). Your chatbot can ensure that no customer leaves your website without taking action towards a sale.
Build relationships with them on a personal level
If you are wondering whether bots make conversations less personal, we are here to make a case against it. A well-trained chatbot can be as personal as a human representative. The consistency and fail-proof automation make bots more reliable and customer-friendly. Chatbots can be fed customer information by integrating them with your CRM. And this information can then be used to initiate conversations when they return to your website.
You can also track user activity within your website to understand what your customer is trying to achieve. Say, for example, you see a customer repeatedly visiting the pricing page over a couple of days. You can reach out to them with a triggered message and offer to give them more information or even a pricing discount. By reassuring the customer that they are important to the business, you will have gained their satisfaction.
Ask for feedback, always
Nobody ever stays for that two-minute feedback message at the end of a toll-free call. But, chatbots collect feedback at the touch of a button. After every interaction, chatbots ask whether the customer was able to get the answer they were looking for. It may seem like the chatbot is fishing for compliments (trust us, it’s not!); it is letting you know whether the customer was satisfied with the answer they were given. At Freshchat the chatbots segment feedback into three categories: Unanswered, Improve Coverage, and Under-performing.
- Unanswered: The questions for which the bot couldn’t respond will be labeled as ‘unanswered’. It’s an indication that there’s no content around these questions in the Answers page.
- Improve coverage: The questions for which five different variants are not added will be labeled as ‘improve coverage’. It’s an indication to add the other ways customers can ask the same question so that the bot can deliver precise answers no matter what.
- Underperforming: Articles and FAQs, which are downvoted five or more times, will be labeled as ‘underperforming’. It’s an indication that the article content isn’t helpful and needs to be changed.
Meeting the requirements of the chatbots continuously can ensure that you are providing the customer with the best possible answers.
Measuring chatbot success
To know how well your bot is resolving, you’ll want to measure its performance. While agent performances are measured using CSAT scores, which can often turn-up inconclusively, chatbot performances can be inferred more accurately with the data it collects.
With the feedback that the chatbot accumulates, you’ll be able to measure:
- Bot resolution rate: The percentage of your total conversations that the bot has successfully resolved for your team.
- No. of questions attempted by the bot: Questions attempted by the bot and the ones it didn’t answer correctly.
- Time saved by bot: How much time the bot saved your customers and teammates.
Image showing bot performances and recommendations
CSAT scores are based on qualitative data and are subjective when it comes to analysis. But chatbot metrics rely on gathering quantitative data across all interactions and provide accurate recommendations to meet customer needs.
Chatbots with Freshchat
Freshchat offers two chatbots: The Freddy Answer Bots and the Freddy Custom Bots. These two bots work comprehensively to provide customer satisfaction. The intuitive and precise answer bots give instant answers to your customers. The custom bot automates every repetitive process that can speed up your agent’s productivity. Get started with Freshchat today!
Illustration by Rajesh Raja
Sources
- https://www.hubspot.com/customer-satisfaction
